Slatehttps://alumni.berkeley.edu/taxonomy/term/776/all
enRoots Music: The Beginnings of Rolling Stonehttps://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/winter-2017-power/roots-music-beginnings-rolling-stone
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Peter Richardson</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The 50th anniversary of iconic rock magazine <i>Rolling Stone</i> arrived in November, and the party was long and loud. Origin stories have festooned the magazine and its website; a coffee table book appeared in May; Joe Hagan’s biography of cofounder Jann Wenner, <i>Sticky Fingers,</i> was published in October; and an HBO documentary is scheduled for November. To keep things interesting, Wenner announced that he plans to sell his company’s stake in the magazine, prompting a round of retrospective articles in <i>The New York Times</i> and&nbsp;elsewhere.</p>
<p>When recounting its own past, <i>Rolling Stone</i> routinely features its San Francisco origins. From the outset, the magazine called “the journalistic voice of its generation” attached itself to the city and its Summer of Love. Hatched in a San Francisco loft space shortly after that season, <i>Rolling Stone</i> touted Jefferson Airplane and covered the Grateful Dead drug bust at 710 Ashbury Street. Well before that, cofounder Ralph J. Gleason was featuring the Haight’s vibrant music scene in his <i>San Francisco Chronicle</i> column.</p>
<p>But if <i>Rolling Stone</i> was a creature of the San Francisco counterculture, its success can also be traced to its Berkeley roots. According to Hagan, Wenner’s years at Cal had a profound effect on the magazine’s origins and development. Early contributors and editors—including Greil Marcus, Charles Perry, and Jon Carroll—were Cal alumni, and their stances on politics, drugs, and music were staples in the magazine’s unique editorial&nbsp;formula.</p>
<p>“The Berkeley network was central to the development of <i>Rolling Stone</i>,” Hagan&nbsp;said.</p>
<p>That network began to take shape after Wenner enrolled at Cal in 1963. An English major and political science minor, he was also an editor for SLATE, the student political party that helped launch the Free Speech Movement (FSM). In his spare time, Wenner worked at the NBC radio affiliate KNBR, where he eventually covered the Berkeley campus. He was reporting from the Greek Theatre in December 1964 when police hauled off FSM leader Mario Savio after he tried to respond to UC President Clark Kerr’s address. An AP photograph shows Wenner in a trench coat, microphone in hand, only yards behind the apprehended&nbsp;Savio.</p>
<p><img alt="" class="caption" src="/sites/default/files/image/RS_Savio.png" style="width: 600px; height: 400px; margin: 20px 10px;" title="AP" /></p>
<p>In 1966, Wenner began writing a column called “Something’s Happening” for the <i>Daily Californian. </i>One of its readers was budding culture critic Greil Marcus, who met Wenner through his dormitory roommate in 1964. Marcus recalled that Wenner’s columns were “full of ridiculous acid fantasies” as well as “trenchant views about music and politics.” When added to his studies, reporting, and relentless social networking, Wenner’s columns also signaled his immense drive. According to biographer Hagan, many of Wenner’s friends from that time described him as the most ambitious person they had ever&nbsp;met.</p>
<p>Berkeley’s influence on Marcus, who grew up on the peninsula, ran even deeper. An American Studies seminar taught by Michael Rogin and Larzer Ziff fired his imagination. Rogin was open, charismatic, and not much older than the students; Ziff was more rigorous but was equally inspiring. The class met in a library seminar room, which Marcus described as “the most marvelous place imaginable.” He and his classmates completed their homework there, often staying past midnight to discuss American history, politics, and culture. Afterward, they used a rope to rappel down from the third floor of the closed library. It was “an atmosphere of great intellectual intensity,” Marcus recalled. “The questions were real, part of everyday&nbsp;life.”</p>
<p>Marcus saw strong and direct links between that course and the Free Speech Movement. “Everything we were doing in that seminar was playing out in public,” he said. After one class, he and his fellow students wandered down to Sproul Plaza, where they saw a police car surrounded by hundreds of students. Jack Weinberg, arrested for violating campus restrictions on political activism, sat handcuffed in the back seat. Beginning with Savio, speakers mounted the car and argued the merits of those policies. The entire experience, Marcus said, “made knowledge concrete, real, open, and open-ended.” It also shaped his life and his&nbsp;work.</p>
<p>“The Free Speech Movement had an enormous effect on everyone and in many ways,” Marcus said. “We measured ourselves against it and its values. <i>Rolling Stone</i> wouldn’t have happened without the Free Speech Movement. Everything that I had learned at Berkeley, that I had learned to care about, there was room for that at <i>Rolling Stone.</i>”</p>
<p>In May 1966, Wenner met Ralph J. Gleason at a Grateful Dead concert in Harmon Gym. Gleason had no formal affiliation with Cal, but he “was always involved in University life,” said Marcus, and Wenner was flattered to learn that the columnist was aware of the younger man’s work at the <i>Daily Cal. </i>After witnessing Savio’s arrest at the Greek Theatre, Gleason devoted one of his <i>Chronicle</i> columns to the incident. He also hosted Wenner and others at his Ashby Avenue home, which served as a kind of salon. In the early 1970s, Gleason became the only music journalist to land on President Nixon’s infamous Enemies List. Gleason considered his inclusion a major honor and posted a story about it, circled in red pen, on a wall in his&nbsp;home.</p>
<p>Despite Gleason’s stature (or perhaps because of it), he became a target for Marcus, whose early articles included digs against the veteran columnist. “My view,” said Marcus, “was ‘Let the young guys take the floor now. Let the old guys shuffle off the stage.’” But when he needed a photograph of The Coasters, he called Gleason, drove over to his home, and was invited inside. Gleason indicated that he was familiar with Marcus’s work, including the digs, but he thrilled Marcus with the free-ranging conversation that followed. “I left walking on air,” Marcus&nbsp;recalled.</p>
<p>Wenner dropped out of Cal in 1966, and Gleason arranged a position for him at <i>Sunday Ramparts. </i>The newspaper was a spinoff of <i>Ramparts </i>magazine, the legendary San Francisco muckraker where Gleason was a contributing editor. Marcus continued to follow Wenner’s writing there. “He had an article on Herman’s Hermits and how terrific they were,” Marcus&nbsp;said.</p>
<p>Wenner lost that job when the newspaper folded. Gleason resigned from the magazine over its March 1967 cover story, “A Social History of the Hippies.” He thought the story misleading and inaccurate, and his anger turned to fury when when no one at <i>Ramparts</i> responded to his resignation&nbsp;letter.</p>
<p class="pullquote right">Gleason insisted that the magazine “either go out of business right now or else cover Altamont like it was World War&nbsp;II.”</p>
<p>While visiting with Gleason that summer, Wenner proposed a new magazine. Gleason, who was writing an article called “Like a Rolling Stone,” responded favorably and suggested <i>Rolling Stone</i> for the title. Wenner contacted the <i>Ramparts</i> art director and lifted some design elements from that magazine. When Marcus saw his first stack of <i>Rolling Stone</i> magazines at Whelan’s Smoke Shop on Bancroft Avenue, he sensed Wenner was behind&nbsp;it.</p>
<p><i>Rolling Stone’</i>s<i> </i>professional design outclassed <i>CREEM</i><i>, Crawdaddy!,</i> and other early rock magazines, and its countercultural emphasis distinguished it from trade publications and fanzines. Its album reviews, however, failed to impress Marcus, who complained to <i>Rolling Stone</i> associate editor Charles Perry. Perry had transferred to Cal from Princeton, became involved with SLATE, and graduated in 1964 with a degree in Middle Eastern studies. (During his senior year, he lived in North Berkeley with LSD kingpin Owsley Stanley, who later became the Grateful Dead’s patron and sound engineer. Stanley’s girlfriend, Melissa Cargill, studied chemistry at Cal and played a major role in LSD production. “He was at pains to show that she didn’t do <i>all</i> the work,” Perry recalled.)<b> </b></p>
<p>After graduation, Perry attended dance parties in San Francisco, sampled psychedelic drugs, and worked for the Cal psychology department in an animal facility off Grizzly Peak Boulevard. He connected with <i>Rolling Stone</i> through another Cal roommate and friend of Gleason. Perry began as a proofreader at the new magazine, but when his former roommate entered a treatment center for heroin addiction, Perry replaced him and quickly worked his way up to associate&nbsp;editor.</p>
<p>Within days of contacting Perry, Marcus received an offer to edit the magazine’s Records section for $35 a week. A graduate student by that time, he accepted the offer and debuted his section in July 1969. Later that year, he attended the Altamont Speedway Free Festival and contributed to the “Let It Bleed” issue, which investigated the concert’s feckless planning and lethal violence. That coverage landed <i>Rolling Stone </i>one of its first National Magazine Awards. Behind the scenes, much of the credit went to Gleason, who insisted that the magazine “either go out of business right now or else cover Altamont like it was World War&nbsp;II.”</p>
<p>Jon Carroll, best known for his long-running column in the <i>San Francisco Chronicle</i>, joined <i>Rolling Stone </i>the following year. After arriving at Cal in 1961, he had written for the <i>Daily Cal </i>and edited the <i>California Pelican,</i> the campus humor magazine. When his summer internships at the <i>Chronicle</i> yielded a full-time position in 1963, he dropped out of Cal but continued to live in Berkeley and was present for many of the Free Speech Movement’s key events. At the <i>Chronicle</i>, he edited Gleason, who asked if he’d like to join a new magazine he was forming with a young friend. Carroll declined but followed up six months later. He worked on another Wenner publication, <i>Earth Times,</i> but switched over to <i>Rolling Stone</i> as an assistant editor after that&nbsp;tanked.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/image/RSCover.jpg" style="width: 341px; height: 525px; float: left; margin: 20px 10px;" />Carroll said his time<i> </i>at<i> </i>Cal affected his ideas about sex, politics, civil rights, and seemingly everything else. The whole scene, he said, was “unbelievably seductive.” For him, everything seemed connected to everything else—including marijuana, which “somehow was involved in stopping the war in Vietnam.” In addition to capturing that spirit, <i>Rolling Stone </i>hired good writers and “didn’t look like it was thrown together in the backseat of a station&nbsp;wagon.”</p>
<p><i>Rolling Stone’</i>s audience and reputation grew rapidly. “Being the premier rock magazine wasn’t a coveted title in 1967,” Carroll said, “but it was a big deal ten years later.” He didn’t make it that long. Six months after Carroll joined the staff, Wenner decided that the magazine was too focused on politics. He fired several staff writers and moved Carroll to yet another magazine, the short-lived <i>Rags,</i> which focused on counterculture fashion and shut down in 1971. Wenner’s decision to downplay politics was also short-lived. In 1971, he named Hunter S. Thompson chief of the newly formed National Affairs desk. Thompson’s gonzo dispatches from the 1972 presidential campaign further distinguished <i>Rolling Stone</i> from its&nbsp;competitors.</p>
<p>In 1975, <i>Rolling Stone </i>showed that it could break major stories. After the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnapped Cal undergraduate and media heiress Patty Hearst, the magazine ran a two-part investigative story written by Howard Kohn and David Weir. It traced Hearst’s abduction, her decision to join the SLA, the communiqués aired by Berkeley station KPFA, and Hearst’s participation in SLA bank robberies. Unlike other accounts, however, <i>Rolling Stone’</i>s also told the inside story of Hearst’s time as a fugitive. Kohn and Weir met one of their unnamed sources, Jack Scott, through civil rights attorney and Cal alumnus Michael Kennedy; Scott then introduced the two writers to other key sources. At her trial, Hearst testified that Scott, who held a Ph.D. in sociology from Cal, drove her east in the summer of 1974 and then back to Las Vegas. Scott admitted that he had sheltered Hearst, but when her memoir linked him to terrorist groups, he received $30,000 to settle a libel&nbsp;suit.</p>
<p>Selling the story to <i>Rolling Stone</i> was an easy decision, Weir said: “They paid the best, had the biggest audience, and they were local.” Both Weir and Kohn already wrote for the magazine and admired its freewheeling style. Wenner was eager to publish the story, which was immediately denounced by leftists and the Hearst media empire. And according to Weir, the FBI was incensed because it knew less about Hearst’s underground activities than the magazine&nbsp;did.</p>
<p>By the mid-1970s, <i>Rolling Stone</i> occupied a unique niche in the national media. Its political stories reflected its Berkeley roots, but it could also tap a reliable advertising base—namely, the music industry—that political magazines couldn’t. (<i>Ramparts </i>ran through two private fortunes before folding for good in 1975.) In effect, <i>Rolling Stone’</i>s rock coverage subsidized its political material, which could not have survived on its own. None of this was planned, Wenner insisted, and <i>Rolling Stone</i> never had a business model as such. Instead, it had a point of view and a mission. That combination, he said, drew a large readership, which then attracted&nbsp;advertisers.</p>
<p><i>Rolling Stone</i> moved to New York City in 1977, two years after Gleason’s death at age 58. San Francisco’s status as a global rock capital had diminished, and Wenner felt NYC would be a better location in which to consolidate. By that time, several Berkeley writers and editors had moved on. Marcus wrote <i>Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music</i> in 1975, launching his career as a cultural critic. Perry resigned in 1976 to write a history of the Haight-Ashbury scene. Having attended potluck dinners in the 1970s with Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower, Perry later became a food writer for the <i>Los Angeles Times.</i> Carroll worked for a series of magazines after <i>Rags </i>folded, rejoined the <i>Chronicle</i> as a daily columnist in 1982, retiring in&nbsp;2015.</p>
<p class="pullquote right">Fine acknowledged that balance and strict objectivity have never been Rolling Stone’s calling card. The magazine, he said, “isn’t afraid to write from a specific point of view or put its passions on its&nbsp;sleeve.”</p>
<p>In New York, the Berkeley network’s influence waned but never disappeared. Several longtime Cal faculty, including journalism professors Timothy Ferris and Lowell Bergman, published their early work in <i>Rolling Stone.</i> Its current managing editor, Jason Fine, is a Berkeley alum. Fine, a Laguna Beach native, said he and his father bonded over their shared interest in <i>Rolling Stone. </i>While writing about music for the <i>Daily Cal,</i> Fine would flip through Wenner’s early clippings and morgue files. After finishing his degree in history, he attended the <a href="https://journalism.berkeley.edu/" target="_blank">Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism</a> and described his thesis, an investigation of pot farming on public lands in Humboldt County, as a <i>Rolling Stone–</i>style&nbsp;story.</p>
<p>Asked about the magazine’s niche today, Fine noted that its biweekly publication schedule allows it to run news stories that monthlies can’t. “<i>Rolling Stone</i> remains this very interesting mix of things,” he explained. “It’s a newspaper inside of a magazine, with long-form features as well as pop culture, music, and politics.” Much of its relevance now flows from its award-winning political coverage. In 2006, it landed a National Magazine Award for a story about the Bush administration’s public relations campaign on behalf of the Iraq invasion. Two years later, another National Magazine Award was granted for Matt Taibbi’s edgy political commentary. Since 2010, the magazine has collected two Polk Awards for journalistic excellence—one for a controversial profile of General Stanley McChrystal, and the other for a report on war crimes in&nbsp;Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Fine acknowledged that balance and strict objectivity have never been <i>Rolling Stone’</i>s calling card. The magazine, he said, “isn’t afraid to write from a specific point of view or put its passions on its sleeve.” But that approach has also failed badly. Before Fine took over as managing editor, the publication was savaged for a botched story on rape culture at the University of Virginia. Appearing in 2014 and then retracted the following year, “A Rape on Campus” drew lawsuits against <i>Rolling Stone</i> that are still making their way through the&nbsp;courts.</p>
<p>Like many magazines, <i>Rolling Stone</i> and its ad revenue have shrunk, and it<i> </i>has increasingly turned to online content written by and for millennials. One political staff writer, Tessa Stuart, graduated from Cal with a rhetoric degree in 2009. She described the magazine’s political coverage as “self-aware” and noted that humor and irreverence were staples. One of her posts—“Anthony Scaramucci’s 10 Days in the White House, Ranked”—satirized the communications director’s short tenure along with the Internet’s preoccupation with&nbsp;listicles.</p>
<p>Fine noted that the HBO documentary, <i>Rolling Stone: Stories from the Edge,</i> includes footage of Wenner covering Mario Savio at the Greek Theatre. “That’s where the magazine comes from,” Wenner said. But he added that <i>Rolling Stone’</i>s perspective today shouldn’t be equated with Berkeley, in part because “the counterculture and its values spread across the country.” Perhaps more than any other publication, <i>Rolling Stone</i> was responsible for that&nbsp;development.</p>
<p><i>Rolling Stone’</i>s Berkeley roots may lie deep, but they’re essential to its&nbsp;story. </p>
<p><i>Peter Richardson, Ph.D. ’91, teaches at San Francisco State University and has written critically acclaimed books on the Grateful Dead and </i>Ramparts<i> magazine. His work has appeared in a variety of outlets, from </i>Mother Jones<i> to </i>The American&nbsp;Conservative.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-15 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">From the <a href="/california-magazine/winter-2017-power">Winter 2017 Power</a> issue of <i>California</i>.</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Filed under: <a href="/california-magazine/topic/arts-letters">Arts + Letters</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-5 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Related topics: <a href="/california-magazine/topic/university-california">University of California</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/california-magazine">California magazine</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/cal">Cal</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/uc-berkeley">UC Berkeley</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/berkeley-alumni">Berkeley Alumni</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/peter-richardson">Peter Richardson</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/rolling-stone-magazine">Rolling Stone Magazine</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/ramparts-magazine">Ramparts magazine</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/joe-hagan">Joe Hagan</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/jann-wenner">Jann Wenner</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/sticky-fingers">Sticky Fingers</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/new-york-times-0">The New York Times</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/ashbury-street">Ashbury Street</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/ralph-j-gleason">Ralph J. Gleason</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/grateful-dead">Grateful Dead</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/summer-love">Summer of Love</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/greil-marcus">greil marcus</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/john-carroll">John Carroll</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/charles-perry">Charles Perry</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/free-speech-movement">Free Speech Movement</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/greek-theatre">Greek Theatre</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/knbr">KNBR</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/mario-savio">Mario Savio</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/clark-kerr">Clark Kerr</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/daily-californian">Daily Californian</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/michael-rogin">Michael Rogin</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/larzer-ziff">larzer Ziff</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/san-francisco-chronicle">San Francisco Chronicle</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/richard-nixon">Richard Nixon</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/coasters">The Coasters</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/slate">Slate</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/owsley-stanley">Owsley Stanley</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/melissa-cargill">Melissa Cargill</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/altamont-speedway-free-festival">Altamont Speedway Free Festival</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/patty-hearst">Patty Hearst</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/kpfa">KPFA</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/michael-kennedy">Michael Kennedy</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/hearst-media">Hearst Media</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/jeremiah-tower">Jeremiah Tower</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/alice-waters">Alice Waters</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/haight-ashbury-0">Haight-Ashbury</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/timothy-ferris">Timothy Ferris</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/lowell-bergman">Lowell Bergman</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/uc-berkeley-graduate-school-journalism">UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/polk-awards">Polk Awards</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/journalism">Journalism</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/1960s">1960s</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/matt-taibbi">Matt Taibbi</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-photo-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Image source: Getty Images</div></div></div>Thu, 21 Dec 2017 21:03:44 +0000Sara.Beladi7840 at https://alumni.berkeley.eduThis Is What Will Change Your Political Opponent's Mindhttps://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2017-02-23/what-will-change-your-political-opponents-mind
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Krissy Eliot</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The latest trendy theory among progressives is that emotions, not facts, are most effective in convincing conservative Americans to change their minds for the good of the&nbsp;country.</p>
<p>In a <em>Slate</em> piece called “<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/02/counter_lies_with_emotions_not_facts.html" target="_blank">It’s Time to Give Up on Facts</a>,” journalist Jess Zimmerman says emotional appeal is the only real way to persuade members of the right to seriously consider progressive’s ways of seeing things—that the left should keep facts safe in their arsenal, but they’re not weapons that will win the war. In the <em>Atlantic</em>, Olga Khazan <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/the-simple-psychological-trick-to-political-persuasion/515181/">explains</a> how conservatives are more likely to support ideas that are “morally reframed” to fit their perspective, rather than change their own values based on factually-based arguments—and progressives should keep this in mind so as not to “make the conflict worse.” And in his seminal book&nbsp;<a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo24837087.html" target="_blank"><em>Moral Politics</em></a>, UC Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff says that progressives don&#8217;t often explicitly declare their moral values in the same manner as conservatives, thinking the facts will speak for themselves. But history shows that how you frame the debate is what reels them&nbsp;in.</p>
<p>Okay, yeah: Progressives could afford to improve their skills as political party pick-up artists. But word-sorcery isn’t going to be what ultimately bewitches Trump supporters, says Dr. Lawrence Rosenthal, executive director of the UC Berkeley <a href="http://crws.berkeley.edu/" target="_blank">Center for Right-Wing Studies</a>.</p>
<p>They’ll be persuaded not by rational argument, he says, but by the harsh light of&nbsp;reality.</p>
<p>“I think the transformation of emotion, anger, and perhaps voting, on the right, will be affected not by liberals talking sense or liberals appealing to human kindness, but by reality not coming through as [Trump supporters] expected it to,” Rosenthal says. “If they&#8217;re going to turn, it will be on account of events,” most likely not getting what they believe they were promised.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>“What&#8217;s going to happen when the jobs don&#8217;t come back that Trump has argued for? What happens if he does re-do trade deals?” Rosenthal says. “What happens when people on Obamacare get thrown&nbsp;off?”</p>
<p>Rosenthal says that die-hard Trump supporters have largely gravitated towards him because they want what they believe they’re owed, and the feeling of being let down is&nbsp;pervasive.</p>
<p>The Tea Party elected 65 people into the House of Representatives in 2010, Rosenthal explains, and continued to elect representatives during the Obama years with the idea that they could simply do away with Obamacare. When that didn’t happen, says Rosenthal, they felt betrayed and revolted against the Republican Party establishment—and they’re still clinging to this anger, throwing down some serious <em>shade.</em></p>
<p>So ultimately, there’s not much liberals can do to change the minds of many Trump supporters right now, says Rosenthal, but facts and logic are still important for seducing centrists and progressives—and for setting up a cordon sanitaire so the lies don’t seep out from where truth should be&nbsp;flowing.</p>
<p>“I do think it&#8217;s very important to expose stuff so that lies that beget other lies are contained,” Rosenthal says. “So they don&#8217;t spread from…the alt-right-world into middle-of-the-road&nbsp;people.”</p>
<p>Also, even if facts are holstered temporarily and the proposed moral and emotional debate tactics are perfectly deployed by liberals, it doesn’t matter much if the other party never shows up to&nbsp;listen.&nbsp;</p>
<p>“The liberal press, to its credit, has an ideal of objectivity; it may not succeed in it, but it exists,” Rosenthal says. “The right, and this includes <em>Fox News</em>, so firmly believe from watching the mainstream media, that it has a liberal bias, that the ideas or the ideals of objectivity have completely gone out the window on that&nbsp;side.”</p>
<p>“The right cares about its team,” says Rosenthal. And because Trump supporters may believe there’s little to no room for them at the progressive table, they’re mostly hanging with guys like Glenn Beck and Milo&nbsp;Yiannopoulos.</p>
<p>This past election cycle, <em>Fox </em>was the main news source for 40 percent of Trump voters, <a href="http://www.journalism.org/2017/01/18/trump-clinton-voters-divided-in-their-main-source-for-election-news/">according</a><a href="http://www.journalism.org/2017/01/18/trump-clinton-voters-divided-in-their-main-source-for-election-news/" target="_blank"> to Pew Research</a>, whereas Clinton voters had a much broader media diet, with no single news source being as&nbsp;dominant.</p>
<p>The liberal call to rely more on framing than facts to convince conservatives isn’t new, but the prevalence of the argument is at a level we’ve never seen before, Rosenthal&nbsp;says.</p>
<p>And the upsurge “has to do with how, from the liberal point of view, wildly distorted the right has become in how they see things,” Rosenthal says. “It has a special character in&nbsp;2017.”&nbsp;</p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Filed under: <a href="/california-magazine/topic/human-behavior">Human Behavior</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/law-policy">Law + Policy</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/perspectives">Perspectives</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-5 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Related topics: <a href="/california-magazine/topic/university-california">University of California</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/cal">Cal</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/california-magazine">California magazine</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/uc-berkeley">UC Berkeley</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/krissy-eliot">Krissy Eliot</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/george-lakoff">George Lakoff</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/lawrence-rosenthal">Lawrence Rosenthal</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/center-right-wing-studies">Center for Right-Wing Studies</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/left">Left</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/right">Right</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/politics">politics</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/political-argument">political argument</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/persuasion">persuasion</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/glenn-beck">Glenn Beck</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/milo-yiannopoulos">milo yiannopoulos</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/pew-research">Pew Research</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/fox">Fox</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/olga-khazan">Olga Khazan</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/jess-zimmerman">Jess Zimmerman</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/atlantic">The Atlantic</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/slate">Slate</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/moral-politics">Moral Politics</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/hillary-clinton">Hillary Clinton</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/donald-trump">Donald Trump</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/progressive">progressive</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/tea-party">Tea Party</a></div></div></div>Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:28:25 +0000Sara.Beladi7415 at https://alumni.berkeley.eduReconsidering Socialism: Younger Voters No Longer See the Label as Toxic https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2016-01-29/reconsidering-socialism-younger-voters-no-longer-see-label
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Krissy Eliot</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Technically, the jury is still out on whether Bernie Sanders’s identification as a socialist will hurt the Vermont senator in the Democratic presidential primaries.&nbsp;<i>Slate’s</i> Jordan Weissmann <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/11/19/bernie_sanders_defines_democratic_socialism_it_s_not_all_that_socialist.html">says</a> it was the best thing Sanders ever did, because it conveys the notion that he will implement “fundamental changes in politics” at a time where people desperately want&nbsp;them.</p>
<p>But the fact remains that socialism still has a negative connotation for the majority of U.S. citizens. A June Gallup <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/183713/socialist-presidential-candidates-least-appealing.aspx">poll</a> reported that 9 in 10 Americans would vote for someone who is Catholic, Jewish, Hispanic, black, or female before they would vote for a&nbsp;socialist.</p>
<p>“The label of ‘socialist’ will doom [Sanders], and the reason is that it’s a toxic word in political discourse. That’s true historically,” says Lawrence Rosenthal, executive director and lead researcher of the UC Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies. “[America] is the only major industrialized country that never had a serious socialist party. In the post-WW2 generation, the enemy was the USSR, so the conflation of the word socialism with the enemy was very strong in previous.&nbsp;generations.”</p>
<p>Because socialism is associated with communism, it leaves many Americans with the image of the proletariat huddled together in long lines, waiting for what little sustenance Big Brother will allow—hence the popular <a href="http://www.political-humor.org/socialism-where-you-wait-on-breadlines-capitalism-where-breadlines-wait-on-you.shtml">meme</a>: “Socialism: Where You Wait on Breadlines; Capitalism: Where Breadlines Wait on You.” Americans tend to still be wary that a big, ominous hand will reach down to take what people have earned and hand it to someone else. A socialist government just doesn’t seem fair to ye older&nbsp;generations.</p>
<p>But here’s what’s interesting: Of that group in the Gallup poll who said they’d vote for a socialist, 69 percent were under the age of 30. A May YouGov poll <a href="https://today.yougov.com/news/2015/05/11/one-third-millennials-like-socialism/">indicates</a> that 36 percent of people ages 18 to 39 view socialism favorably, compared to just 15 percent of those over 65. And in a <a href="http://www.people-press.org/2011/12/28/little-change-in-publics-response-to-capitalism-socialism/?src=prc-headline">survey</a> by Pew Research Center, almost half of people ages 18 to 29 viewed socialism&nbsp;favorably.</p>
<p>In short, younger generations are more open to socialist candidates than older—and a country that has long favored capitalism may be experiencing a subtle shift in&nbsp;ideology.</p>
<p><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qmQeYDQ9sNM" width="640"></iframe></p>
<p>So why do younger generations find socialism more appealing? Ironically, one reason may be the GOP&#8217;s penchant for branding President Obama a “socialist” when he is not—the president remains popular with Millennials, who may regard the name-calling less as a slur against Obama than a positive association with the “s”&nbsp;word.</p>
<p>Rigel Robinson, vice president of membership for Cal Berkeley Democrats and founder of UC Berkeley Students for Bernie, says younger generations were raised in a time when there is less bias toward socialist governments elsewhere, and more willingness to contemplate radical economic changes. “A lot of Millennials don&#8217;t have the same reaction to [socialist] words and branding that a lot of older people do,” Robinson said. “People who aren&#8217;t familiar with the history of socialism in other countries and haven&#8217;t been subjected to ad campaigns against it don’t have the same visceral reaction to the&nbsp;word.</p>
<p>“People are definitely excited at the idea for something vastly different happening and someone coming into office with a different paradigm,” Robinson continues. “A lot of people under 30 have grown up in a time of unprecedented increases in income inequality and they would like to see some of that change, because it&#8217;s clear that the way things are operating currently are not particularly promising as far as income inequality is&nbsp;concerned.”</p>
<p>The latest Ipsos <a href="http://www.ipsos-na.com/news-polls/pressrelease.aspx?id=7108" target="_blank">poll</a> supports Robinson&#8217;s theory, revealing that the most often cited political issues for Millennials are the economy (35 percent) and education (28 percent). Also, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/01/11/poll-millennials-agenda-president-rock-the-vote-republican-trump-sanders-democrat/78556154/" target="_blank">according</a> to a USA Today/Rock the Vote Millennial Poll, not only do more Millennials identify as Democrats (41 percent) than Republicans (28 percent), but Sanders is the favorite candidate of Millennial Democrats (while Trump holds an edge among Millennial&nbsp;Republicans).</p>
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<p>Conventional wisdom holds that young people, on average, embrace more liberal politics in their youth and then move to the right as they age and accumulate wealth they don&#8217;t want to see redistributed (hence the famous quote often wrongly attributed to Winston Churchilll: “If you aren’t a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, but if you aren’t a middle-aged conservative, you have no head.”). Even so, when they were in their 20s, Baby Boomers and even Generation X believed more in the American dream because they had opportunity to achieve it—whereas Millennials are more likely to be saddled with student debt and be more pessimistic about their prospects. It&#8217;s not yet clear where the generation will land politically, <a href="http://www.npr.org/2015/11/21/456676215/why-do-young-people-like-socialism-more-than-older-people" target="_blank">said</a> Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, in an interview with&nbsp;NPR.</p>
<p class="pullquote right">“Language about capitalism and socialism is vague, and using these terms assumes knowledge millennials may not have&nbsp;acquired.”</p>
<p>“For example, young women who are in their late 20s and early 30s aren&#8217;t really turning more conservative than younger women,” Kawashima-Ginsberg said, “whereas older millennial men are now a little bit more conservative than younger millennial men, showing that the men are in some ways following that trend—becoming a little bit more conservative, maybe more supportive of a Republican platform. Young women continue to hold pretty liberal views, and that doesn&#8217;t seem to be&nbsp;shifting.”</p>
<p>While older generations see capitalism as the way to fiscally thrive, younger people may think integrating socialism is a better, fairer bet—particularly since they identify socialist policies more with nurturing countries such as Sweden and Norway than with repressive ones such as the old USSR and nations of the former Eastern&nbsp;Bloc.</p>
<p>However, in a <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/10/30/danish-pm-at-iop/">speech</a> at the Kennedy School of Government, Danish prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said he appreciated that Denmark’s government is recognized as a political ideal, but he wants to make it clear that people often are wrong about Denmark. “I know that some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism,” Rasmussen said. “Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market&nbsp;economy.”</p>
<p class="pullquote left">“Sanders&#8217;s platform hardly looks like radical socialism. Instead, it is what nearly every Democratic voter would support deep down and what most Americans realize is&nbsp;fair.”</p>
<p>Tap into U.S. political discourse today, and it becomes clear that there is not a single definition of socialism. A Reason-Rupe report cited this paradox and suggested it might all be semantics: While Millennials said they preferred capitalism over socialism 52 to 42 percent, they said they preferred a free-market economy over a government-managed economy by a much wider margin of 64 to 32 percent. The Libertarian-oriented folks at <em>Reason </em><a href="http://reason.com/poll/2014/07/16/millennials-dont-know-what-socialism-mea">conclude</a> Millennials are simply unable to define socialism: “Language about capitalism and socialism is vague, and using these terms assumes knowledge millennials may not have acquired.” Meanwhile writers at progressive outlets such as the Daily Kos suggest that Sanders is not actually a socialist but a social Democrat: “Sanders&#8217;s platform hardly looks like radical socialism,” <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/6/7/1389039/-Bernie-Sanders-is-a-democratic-socialist-but-what-does-that-term-mean">observes</a> Stephen Wolf. “Instead, it is what nearly every Democratic voter would support deep down and what most Americans realize is&nbsp;fair.”</p>
<p>Rosenthal points out that calling a country “socialist” now is an easy way to generalize places that have a generous welfare&nbsp;state.</p>
<p>“There’s always been a kind of enlightened liberalism in this country, which knew better, which knew what welfare states in Europe were like. Everybody in America knows that Canada has national health (care), and Britain has had national health since the late 40s,” Rosenthal said, ”There are a lot of people who have understood for a long time that ‘modern socialism,’ as it were, is really about what&#8217;s often called ‘the welfare&nbsp;state.’”</p>
<p>Nonetheless, he says, “the strength of the other point of view where socialism is a toxic word is vastly&nbsp;greater.”</p>
<p>The term and the ideology have had a fractious history in the United States. Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs <a href="http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/159564">earned</a> over a million votes in 1918. The Socialist Party of America grew along with similar groups elsewhere, such as the French Socialist Party and the British Labor Party. There were also many socialist U.S. mayors elected in the early 1900s, including Milwaukee&#8217;s Emil Seidel in 1910 and Berkeley&#8217;s Jackson Stitt <a href="http://www.berkeleyhistoricalsociety.org/uploads/newsletters/2011_Summer_Newsletter.pdf">Wilson</a>, who served from 1911 to 1913. Once America entered World War I, the socialists who opposed the war were often arrested, their publications closed, their movement monitored. Throughout the past century, apprehension about a “Domino-theory” spread of communism, paranoia about leftist infiltration, and disillusionment with how Marxist theory played out in the countries that attempted, it led to a waning of socialist support throughout the United States. But it never completely faded, particularly around college towns: UC Berkeley alum and Democratic socialist Ron Dellums, for instance, was elected to 13 consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives from the Berkeley-Oakland district before retiring from Congress in&nbsp;1998.</p>
<p>Kerida Moates, president of the Berkeley College Republicans, says that younger generations’ desire to implement socialist policies comes from a good-natured place. Still, “I don&#8217;t think the vast majority of Americans want a socialist candidate. I think the support we&#8217;ve seen for socialist candidates such as Bernie Sanders are coming from the fringes,” Moates says. “I feel that young people who are voting for a socialist candidate feel like they&#8217;re taking the moral high ground. They want to give workers a $15 an hour minimum wage because they want to see them&nbsp;succeed.”</p>
<p>Sanders is indeed framing the national electoral battle in moral terms, arguing in Democratic debates: “It is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of 1 percent own 90 percent—almost as much wealth as the bottom 90&nbsp;percent.”</p>
<p>As of now, Sanders is polling higher than expected against Clinton in the earliest caucuses (Iowa) and leading by a wide margin in the first primary (New Hampshire). Neither state, however, is particularly adept at picking the ultimate winners, and national polls still show Clinton with the edge. Most political analysts <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/is-the-bernie-sanders-surge-real/">attribute</a> the “Sanders surge” that to the fact that although Clinton continues to be pummeled by GOP contenders, he has scarcely faced a sliver of negative scrutiny—except, of course, for the disparagement of his chances based on his violation of the socialism&nbsp;taboo.</p>
<p>“Someone who really is a true principled socialist would probably never get elected to the highest office of president here,” Robinson says. “But Bernie is bringing a lot of elements of that ideology to capitalism, and people tend to be pretty receptive to that. Especially young people who don&#8217;t necessarily have the same knee jerk reaction to the word and can contextualize things on a case by case basis with the&nbsp;issues.”</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Filed under: <a href="/california-magazine/topic/human-behavior">Human Behavior</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/law-policy">Law + Policy</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-5 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Related topics: <a href="/california-magazine/topic/socialist">socialist</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/socialism">socialism</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/us-presidential-politics">U.S. presidential politics</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/bernie-sanders">Bernie Sanders</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/social-democrat">social democrat</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/uc-berkeley">UC Berkeley</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/berkeley">Berkeley</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/cal">Cal</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/hillary-clinton">Hillary Clinton</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/millennials">Millennials</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/generation-x">Generation X</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/boomers">Boomers</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/capitalism">capitalism</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/communism">communism</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/kei-kawashima-ginsberg">Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/gallup-poll">Gallup Poll</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/ipsos-poll">Ipsos Poll</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/yougov-poll">YouGov poll</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/pew-research-center">Pew Research Center</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/reason-rupe">Reason-Rupe</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/stephen-wolf">Stephen Wolf</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/dailykos">dailykos</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/reason">Reason</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/jordan-weissmann">Jordan Weissmann</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/slate">Slate</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/lawrence-rosenthal">Lawrence Rosenthal</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/berkeley-center-right-wing-studies">Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/cal-berkeley-democrats">Cal Berkeley Democrats</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/rigel-robinson">Rigel Robinson</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/uc-students-bernie">UC Students for Bernie</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/kerida-moates">Kerida Moates</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/berkeley-college-republicans">Berkeley College Republicans</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/ron-dellums">Ron Dellums</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/emil-seidel">Emil Seidel</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/sackson-stitt">Sackson Stitt</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/eugene-debs">Eugene Debs</a></div></div></div>Fri, 29 Jan 2016 21:03:54 +0000Krissy.Eliot6894 at https://alumni.berkeley.eduI Can Fry if I Want To: Why Are Females Chided for Vocal Tics That Guys Use Too?https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2015-07-31/i-can-fry-if-i-want-why-are-females-chided-vocal-tics-guys
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Krissy Eliot</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>It seems as if every time a women opens her mouth, she runs the risk of antagonizing the vocal&nbsp;police.</p>
<p>If her voice is too high, she fails to convey authority. If she aims low and engages in “vocal fry”—that <a href="https://youtu.be/YEqVgtLQ7qM">creaky-voiced dip</a> in tone at the end of a sentence—she’s contributing to what Slate’s <em>Lexicon Valley</em> podcast host Bob Garfield decries as a vocal fry “epidemic”: Likening it to “a human record scratch,” he declares, “When you hear it enough, you may want to kill yourself.” If she drops in filler words such as “like” and “you know,” she evokes the merciless mocking familiar to viewers of the films <em>Clueless</em> and <em>Legally Blonde.</em> And if she uses “uptalk” (the raising of pitch at the end of a phrase or sentence? To make it sound like a question? Even though it’s a statement?) she finds her vocal pattern derided in a myriad of recent articles that address female upspeak as a demon to be be exorcised from the body of phonetics. In a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/24/vocal-fry-strong-female-voice">recent letter addressed to young women</a>, feminist Naomi Wolf warned that they were being “hobbled” by vocal habits that signaled submission, hesitancy and&nbsp;weakness.</p>
<p>But here’s the truth of the matter: Both genders engage in these vocal and speech&nbsp;behaviors.</p>
<p>Research by University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3626&amp;utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter">shows that</a> the “low creaky vibrations” of vocal fry “have been common since forever” among men and women (even though women tend to use it more). Publisher Pearson <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2538554/Want-promotion-Dont-speak-like-AUSSIE-Rising-pitch-end-sentences-make-sound-insecure.html">surveyed 700 managers</a> and asked them how they feel about upspeak in both sexes (since research shows that men and women do it), and 70 percent said it was “annoying” for all genders and would hinder chances of getting a job. Liberman also <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=93">analyzed 12,000 phone conversations</a> and discovered that although young people used filler words such as “like” more than older people, men and women both used it. In fact, men use it <em>more</em> often.</p>
<p>So why are female speech patterns, like, under such scrutiny, while men can, like, talk however they&nbsp;want?</p>
<p>“Young, urban women are the leaders of language change,” said Auburn Barron-Lutzross, a linguist and UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate who researches the way people use language to understand and construct social identities. “So when something new happens [in female speech], people will become critical and maybe even disturbed and say, ‘That’s not how the language is supposed to sound!’ But it will continue to&nbsp;spread.”</p>
<p>In other words, women are speech innovators. And these innovations can be a shock when they subvert listener expectations of how people “should”&nbsp;sound.</p>
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<b>People on the UC Berkeley campus talk about their own voices, the voices of others—and their perceptions of how males and females “should” sound.</b>
<p>For example, people expect a higher-pitched tone from a woman, and when she delivers a low, creaky voice (vocal fry), a listener is more likely to regard it as suspect. In <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0097506#s1">a 2014 study</a>, researchers recorded seven young adult males and seven young adult females saying, “Thank you for considering me for this opportunity” in both their regular tone and in vocal fry. The recordings were played for 400 male listeners and 400 female listeners. Listeners tended to prefer normal voices over vocal fry, but they also generally disliked the female vocal fryers more—ranking them as less hirable and less “trustworthy” than the male&nbsp;fryers.</p>
<p>Because it is a vocal flourish, fry can make someone’s speech sound affected or unnatural. This can make a speaker seem inauthentic—especially if the speaker is a female who traditionally has a higher, non-creaky&nbsp;voice.</p>
<p>“Nobody wants to talk to somebody who sounds like a machine, or somebody that [makes you wonder] if they really mean what they say,” said Deborah Sussel, an acting, voice and speech coach and senior lecturer emerita at UC Berkeley. “If it sounds mechanical, if it sounds like a style of speaking, if your belief isn&#8217;t behind it, it&#8217;s going to sound&nbsp;phony.”</p>
<p>Men, of course, usually speak in a lower register, so when they use vocal fry to dip into a deeper tone, they simply seem more “manly.” In fact, vocal fry was originally used more often by men to seem “hyper-masculine,” and was considered to be a “robust marker of male speech,” according to <a href="http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/content/85/3/315.abstract">an academic paper</a> by visiting Berkeley scholar Ikuko Patricia&nbsp;Yuasa.</p>
<p>“Despite the fact that more recent researchers have detected frequent creaky voice usage among female speakers,” Yuasa writes, “in general, previous researchers of creaky voice have interpreted it as a voice quality of masculinity or&nbsp;authority.”</p>
<p>So when a woman uses vocal fry, she&#8217;s deviating from the tone society expects her to use—and this can be jarring since feminine voices are not usually tied to authority. “Women are relatively newer to positions of authority,” said Sussel. “So it&#8217;s like women are upstarts. They&#8217;re really scrutinized and critically listened to.”<img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/image/SpeechMeeting.jpg" style="width: 450px; height: 300px; float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;" /></p>
<p>Of course, a woman doesn’t want to avoid vocal fry so much that her tone becomes <em>too&nbsp;</em>high pitched—lest she deliver information in the form of a shrill, female&nbsp;yak.</p>
<p>After all, research shows that <a href="http://www.livescience.com/25485-people-prefer-manly-voiced-leaders.html">people prefer leaders with deep voices</a>. Lower voices signify dominance and strength, probably because (shocker) men have deeper voices and have been in power since, well, forever. (Apparently <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/margaret-thatcher/8999746/How-Maggie-Thatcher-was-remade.html">Margaret Thatcher had the right idea</a> when she hired a coach to make her voice&nbsp;deeper.)</p>
<p>So it could be that if a woman is experimenting with her tone or inflection in a way that has yet to be normalized with deep-boomy-man voices, she’s kinda linguistically fringe. And since studies have shown that men are traditionally slower on the linguistic uptake (or should I say, “uptalk”), it can take a while for these trends to become acceptable in&nbsp;society.</p>
<p>For example, women have been using uptalk more casually and frequently than men for decades. It wasn’t until recent years that men finally started to catch on. Even though women still use it more than guys, men are now upspeaking a lot too, <a href="http://acoustics.org/pressroom/httpdocs/166th/4pSCa2-Ritchart.html">according to linguistic</a> studies at the University of California, San&nbsp;Diego.</p>
<p>Last year sociologist Thomas Linneman researched uptalk by watching 100 episodes of the game show <em>Jeopardy!</em> and tracking when and how men and women did it. “Men use uptalk more when surrounded by women contestants,” he observed, “and when correcting a woman contestant after she makes an incorrect&nbsp;response.”</p>
<p>The fact that men shift their speech to match women makes sense. It’s common for people to change how they talk to fit into a group—the phenomenon is called speech&nbsp;convergence.</p>
<p>Given that femininity and “talking like a girl” have long been more likely to be regarded as “weak” or “dumb,” it would make sense for people to be surprised and have a negative reaction to men changing their speech to fit in with the ladies. <a href="http://www.gq.com/story/valley-guys-male-upspeak">In her <i>GQ</i> essay on upspeak</a>, Renee Dale cautions men against talking like “an attractive girl-woman,” and suggests what would happen if a man started using uptalk: “If you have a partner with ‘different ideas about money,’ understand what she might do with this. Treat you like the quavery schoolgirl you sound like and buy herself a fancy new bag. To put your plums in because you don’t need them&nbsp;anymore.”</p>
<p>Yikes.</p>
<p>As if women weren’t getting enough flak for their fry and upspeak, they’re also criticized for using filler words, which, as studies have shown, <em>everyone</em> does. But because women tend to use certain kinds of filler words more, those words are then perceived as a disturbing female tic.<img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/image/WomanHologram.jpg" style="width: 400px; height: 333px; float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;" /></p>
<p>The founder of Karmahacks, Ellen Petry Lense, wrote <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/just-say-ellen-petry-leanse">a viral LinkedIn post</a> urging women to stop using the word “just” because it’s “a subtle message of subordination, of deference,” she contends. “It hit me that there was something about the word I didn’t like. It was a ‘permission’ word, in a way—a warm-up to a request, an apology for interrupting, a shy knock on a door before asking ‘Can I get something I need from&nbsp;you?’”</p>
<p>And these critiques aren’t <em>just</em> delivered in blogs and articles—you can even find them in shampoo&nbsp;ads.</p>
<p>After studies showed that females tend to apologize more than males, because women “have a higher threshold” than men “for what constitutes offensive behavior,” a <a href="https://youtu.be/rzL-vdQ3ObA">Pantene commercial</a> attacked women’s use of the filler word “sorry.” The ad shows a series of women apologizing for interrupting someone in their office, say, or taking a blanket from a partner in bed. “Why are women always apologizing?” the ad says. “Don’t be sorry. Be strong and&nbsp;shine!”</p>
<p>The ad then shows the same women stealing blankets and opening doors to people’s offices without a “sorry” inserted—as if that’s the better way to speak. Because barging in or blanket-hogging without apology is somehow the better way to go about&nbsp;things.</p>
<p>Where are all the Axe commercials and open letters to men suggesting that guys cease using fillers—or for that matter, prodding them to apologize&nbsp;more?</p>
<p>As blogger Debuk <a href="https://debuk.wordpress.com/2015/07/05/just-dont-do-it/">satirically points out</a>, they’re in short&nbsp;supply:</p>
<blockquote>
<div>This week everyone’s been talking about an article in the Economist explaining how men’s use of language undermines their authority. According to the author, a senior manager at Microsoft, men have a bad habit of punctuating everything they say with sentence adverbs like ‘actually’, ‘obviously’, ‘seriously’ and ‘frankly’. This verbal tic makes them sound like pompous bullshitters, so that people switch off and stop listening to what they’re saying. If they want to be successful, this is something men need to address.</div>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<div>OK, people haven’t been talking about that article — mainly because I made it up. No one writes articles telling men how they’re damaging their career prospects by using the wrong words. With women, on the other hand, it’s a regular occurrence.</div>
</blockquote>
<p>What’s most interesting about this is the research surrounding why women use certain kinds of filler words&nbsp;more.</p>
<p>Researchers at the University of Texas broke up filler words into two categories: filled pauses and discourse markers. The use of filled pauses (words like “uh” and “um”) was found to be <a href="http://jls.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/03/26/0261927X14526993.abstract">comparable across all ages and genders</a>. But discourse markers, like “I mean” and “you know,” don’t simply fill silences—they convey meaning, purposefully signaling to a listener that the speaker is simply expressing a personal opinion or seeking assurance that the listener is understanding them. The use of such discourse markers was found to be “more common among women, younger participants, and more conscientious&nbsp;people.”</p>
<p>So even though women’s tendency to use more discourse markers may be perceived as a verbal tic, it could actually be that women are just far more thorough, careful and principled in their speech. Perhaps men should adopt more frequent use of “sorry” and “just” in order to be perceived as more meticulous and get along better with&nbsp;people.</p>
<p>The irony of all this is that the media’s widespread, negative reaction to female linguistic tendencies calls more attention to them, which could cause more people to pick them up in the long run. Sure, there are a lot of people who don’t want to talk like Kim Kardashian, poster child of vocal fry—but there are <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/31/vocal-fry_n_6082220.html">also a lot of people who <i>do.</i></a></p>
<p>Regardless of what anyone thinks of a woman&#8217;s voice or manner of speaking, if it&#8217;s not getting in the way of communication, then the critics should probably just get over&nbsp;it.</p>
<p>“It all depends on the individual case,” says Sussel, the vocal and speech coach. “One of the things that I&#8217;m assessing is if their habit is getting in the way of their communication to such an extent that I would want to encourage a new habit. If it&#8217;s just occasional, I don&#8217;t see anything wrong with&nbsp;it.”</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Filed under: <a href="/california-magazine/topic/arts-letters">Arts + Letters</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/cal-culture">Cal Culture</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/human-behavior">Human Behavior</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-5 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Related topics: <a href="/california-magazine/topic/vocal-fry">vocal fry</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/uptalk">uptalk</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/filler-speech">filler speech</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/womens-speech">women&#039;s speech</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/men-speech">men&#039; speech</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/speech-patterns">speech patterns</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/feminism">feminism</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/uc-berkeley">UC Berkeley</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/linguistics">linguistics</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/auburn-barron-lutzross">Auburn Barron-Lutzross</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/deborah-sussel">Deborah Sussel</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/vocal-coach">vocal coach</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/ikuko-patricia-yuasa">Ikuko Patricia Yuasa</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/university-california">University of California</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/thomas-linneman">Thomas Linneman</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/uc-san-diego">UC San Diego</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/naomi-wolf">Naomi Wolf</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/university-pennsylvania">University of Pennsylvania</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/mark-liberman">Mark Liberman</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/clueless">Clueless</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/legally-blonde">Legally Blonde</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/slate">Slate</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/lexicon-valley-podcast">Lexicon Valley podcast</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/bob-garfield">Bob Garfield</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/jeopardy">Jeopardy</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/gq">GQ</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/renee-dale">Renee Dale</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/ellen-petry-lense">Ellen Petry Lense</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/karmahacks">Karmahacks</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/linkedin">LinkedIn</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/debuk">Debuk</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/pantene">Pantene</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/university-texas">University of Texas</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/kim-kardashian">Kim Kardashian</a></div></div></div>Wed, 29 Jul 2015 23:39:18 +0000Vicki Haddock6721 at https://alumni.berkeley.edu40 Signs You Fell for Berkeley "Click Bait"https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2013-10-27/40-signs-you-succumbed-berkeley-click-bait
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="MsoNormal">
It’s still ricocheting around cyberspace, shared via Facebook from alum to alum. Indeed the <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/">BuzzFeed</a> post <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/louispeitzman/signs-you-went-to-berkeley">“40 Signs You Went to Berkeley”</a> has proved an irresistible 2013 hit with its narrow niche of an audience, racking up more than 200,000 views and&nbsp;counting.
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But it’s also become a flash point of controversy about what, if anything, its popularity reveals about the future of online&nbsp;“content”.
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Such compilations—christened “demolisticles” and derived from the etymological mash-up of “demographic,” “list” and “article”—have become ridiculously successful click bait for micro-targeted slivers of an online readership. &nbsp;Among the thousands of thriving entries are <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/chasenordmans/16-ways-you-know-you-go-to-the-university-of-alaba-cs9x">“16 Ways You Know You Go the University of Alabama”</a> (#14—”Sirens from ambulances with injured/dying people are TOO commonplace”),&nbsp; <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/amyl59/signs-you-grew-up-on-a-scottish-island-dok0">“26 Signs You Grew Up on a Scottish Island”</a> (#11—”You know it’s summer because you have slightly unzipped your anorak”) and <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewgauthier/things-minnesotans-are-too-nice-to-brag-about">“30 Things Minnesotans Are Too Nice to Brag About”</a> (#33—”Beautiful butter&nbsp;sculptures”).
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But for some reason, the Berkeley BuzzFeed has become the poster child for demolisticles and a focus for those who love to hate them. And that, in turn, is prompting listicle aficionados to suggest critics should lighten&nbsp;up.
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“I think some of the criticism of BuzzFeed is a little bit snooty,” said recent Cal grad and former California Magazine intern Ariane Lange, co-author of BuzzFeed&#8217;s Berkeley listicle. “This is a silly list, as opposed to journalism….Some people think you have to be serious all the time, but I think it’s fine to have the silliness alongside the&nbsp;seriousness.”
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The genesis of this particular demolisticle can be traced to the Los Angeles offices of BuzzFeed, which employs Lange and Louis Peitzman, a former Daily Californian arts editor. Other staffers had begun to garner respectable clicks from lists extolling the idiosyncrasies of their own alma maters; Berkeley seemed like a natural. Because Peitzman graduated a few years before Lange, she says he enlisted her assistance to ensure the examples were still&nbsp;relevant.
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They brainstormed off the top of their heads, exchanged ideas via email, incorporated a collection of flickr photos, and watched&nbsp; “40 Signs You Went to Berkeley” go viral among their fellow Berkeleycentric&nbsp;alums.
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Enter antagonist Will Oremus, a scribe at online magazine Slate (and, it must be noted, a graduate of Columbia University who appears to have never ventured beneath Sather Gate). Skimming his Facebook news feed one day, he encountered a link to the Berkeley demolisticle. Incredulous at its brazen exclusivity—after all, such a list would be utterly meaningless to 99.8 percent of all Americans—he clicked&nbsp;through.
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The “signs” ran the gamut from the university-specific (#1—”You were indoctrinated at CalSO”) to the campus-specific (#10—”You’ve gotten lost in Dwinelle”) to the neighborhood specific (#17—”You’ve purchased potent edibles from Patches on Telegraph”) to the sociologically specific (#35—”You’re still surprised not everyone knows that gender is a social&nbsp;construct.”)
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“What the hell is CalSO? The authors don’t bother to explain,” Oremus complained, noting similar frustration that the authors didn&#8217;t “deign to elaborate” on the meaning of GBC, FSM, GSI or&nbsp;TeleBEARS.
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His Slate piece bore the headline: <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/07/demolisticles_buzzfeed_lists_crafted_for_specific_demographics_are_social.html">“The Rise of the Demolisticle: 40 Signs You Can Publish Any Old Crap Nowadays As Long As It’s&nbsp;Well-Targeted.”</a>
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<p>
“Five years ago an item with such limited appeal would have struggled to pass muster at Berkeley’s student newspaper, let alone a national media outlet,” he observed. “Posts like this require little to no reporting, only a tiny bit of writing, and, evidently, minimal&nbsp;imagination.”
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His reaction piece penetrated the online media ecosystem, and <a href="http://muckrack.com/link/dq7k/demolisticles-buzzfeed-lists-crafted-for-specific-demographics-are-social-media-gold">generated its own </a><a href="http://muckrack.com/link/dq7k/demolisticles-buzzfeed-lists-crafted-for-specific-demographics-are-social-media-gold">counter-reaction</a>: Not everyone was so willing to turn BuzzFeed into buzzkill. Ben Dreyfuss, engagement editor at Mother Jones, tweeted, “Shorter Slate: Every site was doing the same thing, then BuzzFeed did something new and people liked it. Damn&nbsp;them.”
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It can be argued that the demolisticle isn&#8217;t a new concept at all; print magazines and David Letterman have for years exploited the truism that people love lists. But lists have special currency online, where clicks are commerce and readers are presumed to possess the attention span of a housefly on a sugar rush. Not only are slide shows and click-throughs likelier to retain readers’ interest, but they maximize the number of advertisements that can cozy up next to the content. Analysts report that readers are significantly more inclined to click on a piece and stay on it if it features oodles of photographs as opposed to, say, oodles of text. Outbrain, a content discovery platform that <a href="http://www.outbrain.com/blog/2011/06/5-tips-to-improve-your-headline-clickthrough-rate.html">analyzed data on 150,000 online headlines</a>, has even claimed to have found that lists containing odd numbers snare a 20 percent higher click-through rate than their even-numbered&nbsp;counterparts.
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BuzzFeed, which critics say has gamed Facebook as skillfully as Demand Media once gamed Google, has emerged to dominate the demolisticle. All it takes is attracting the eyeballs of a relatively miniscule subset of readers (say, friends of the authors) and relying on them to repost, share and retweet a piece to everyone in their social media network with whom they share a common bond. In this case,&nbsp;Cal.
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The beauty of it all? It&#8217;s both self-referential and&nbsp;self-reverential.
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“It’s ‘sharing this says something about who I am,’ “ Lange explains. She makes the case that the listicle can actually be good for journalism. “Long-form journalism is valuable as well, but long-form is not as accessible to as many people. People who won’t read long-form will read a&nbsp;list.”
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Which is not to say that demolisticles, which often are devoid of thought, must always be so. Lange cites her recent post,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/arianelange/how-many-gay-jokes-were-there-at-james-francos-roast">“How Many Gay Jokes Were There at James Franco&#8217;s Roast?”&nbsp;</a> “The James Franco piece is an example of the demolisticle as journalism,” she says. “It also makes a point, which is that gay jokes are tired and offensive, and it does it in an accessible&nbsp;way.”
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As is the case with the proliferation of reality TV shows, the success of one demolisticle serves only to germinate hundreds more, from <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/copyranter/16-homoerotic-photos-of-vladimir-putin">“The 16 Most Homoerotic Photos of Vladimir Putin”</a> to&nbsp;<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/02/offal_n_3194816.html"> “21 Kinds of Offal, Ranked by How Gross They Look”&nbsp;</a> (highlights include food-porn photos of pork trotter, duck tongue, pig snout and calf brain.) Satirists are resorting to mockery, such as The Awl&#8217;s&nbsp; “Listicles Without Commentary” feature (among them is <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2013/04/the-cast-of-12-angry-men-in-order-of-hotness">“The Cast of ‘Twelve Angry Men’ in Order of Hotness,” </a>which reads just like it sounds: “#1—Juror #9, #2–Juror #10, #3—Juror&nbsp;#3&#8230;)
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But for evidence of the sheer ubiquitousness of the listicle, look no further than BuzzFeed&#8217;s recent debut of <a href="http://www.listiclock.com/">The ListiClock,</a> a flipping online timekeeper that literally displays a BuzzFeed list for every hour, minute and second of every&nbsp;day.
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Meanwhile BuzzFeed’s Berkeley list has inspired its own homage from The Daily Californian&#8217;s blog The Daily Clog, entitled <a href="http://www.dailycal.org/2013/08/05/40-more-signs-you-went-to-uc-berkeley/">“40 More Signs You Went to UC Berkeley.”</a> Cal alumni continue to share both posts, while offering their own&nbsp;additions.
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At this rate, the half-life of the demolisticle could rival that of&nbsp;plutonium.
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—Vicki&nbsp;Haddock
</p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Filed under: <a href="/california-magazine/topic/cal-culture">Cal Culture</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-5 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Related topics: <a href="/california-magazine/topic/uc-berkeley">UC Berkeley</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/buzzfeed">BuzzFeed</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/demolisticle">demolisticle</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/slate">Slate</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/will-oremus">Will Oremus</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/ariane-lange">Ariane Lange</a></div></div></div>Tue, 03 Sep 2013 06:09:53 +0000Vicki Haddock5320 at https://alumni.berkeley.edu